‘Get in and cover your father,’ Eva ordered. ‘We mustn’t let him be seen by the guard on the gate.’
The next moment Wilt was on the floor and the four girls were kneeling on top of him. As Eva started the car and drove down the drive she glanced in the rear-view mirror and glimpsed a dishevelled Inspector Flint hurtle out of the door of the hospital, trip and land face down on the gravel. Eva put her foot on the accelerator and five minutes later they were through the gates and heading for Oakhurst Avenue.
Chapter 36
Inspector Flint arrived in his office in a state of confusion. His conversation with Eva had confirmed him in his belief that whatever mess Henry Wilt had got himself into he was not responsible for the death of Harold Rottecombe. Tripping on the gravel and then being trampled over by a herd of maddened lunatics had given him fresh insight into Wilt’s inconsequential view of life. Things just happened to people for no good reason and, while Flint had previously believed that every effect had to have a rational cause, he now realised that the purely accidental was the norm. In short, nothing made sense. The world was as mad as the inmates of the hospital he had just left.
In an effort to regain something approaching equanimity he ordered Sergeant Yates to bring him the notes on the Rottecombe murder case he’d received from the Chief Superintendent who had been cross-examining Ruth the Ruthless. Flint read them through and came to the conclusion that, far from being involved in the death of the Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement, Wilt had himself been the victim of an assault. Everything pointed to the Shadow Minister’s wife. Wilt’s blood in the garage and in the Volvo, the fact that she was seen in Ipford New Estate and caught on the motorway camera in the middle of the night, and in Flint’s opinion that she had been on sado-masochistic terms with the paedophile ‘Bobby Beat Me’ Battleby whose house had been torched. In addition there was a motive. Wilt had been in the lane behind Meldrum Manor. His jeans had been found there two days after the fire but they hadn’t been there when the police had searched the lane on the day after the fire. It followed that they had been put there in order to implicate him in the arson. Finally and most damning of all his knapsack, socks and boots had been recovered from the attic in Leyline Lodge and he was hardly likely to have put them there himself. No, everything pointed to Mrs Rottecombe. Wilt had no reason to kill her husband and if the Shadow Minister suspected or, worse still, knew his wife had connived in the fire, she had every reason to want him dead. At this point Flint spotted a flaw. Wilt hadn’t been found dead. He’d certainly been assaulted by some young thugs on the New Estate and the Rottecombe bitch had brought him there without his jeans or walking boots. Why had they been removed? That was the mystery. He went back to the theory that she’d needed them to indicate that he’d been involved in the arson of the Manor. But why leave them in the lane two days later than the fire? That only deepened the mystery. The Inspector gave up.
In Hereford Police Station the Chief Superintendent, urged on by Downing Street, hadn’t. He no longer believed Wilt had had anything to do with the torching of Meldrum Manor or the death of the Shadow Minister. He had ordered the police at Oston to find witnesses to Wilt’s journey and to trace his route as far as they could. ‘You know where he stayed each night,’ he told the Inspector there. ‘What I want now is for your men to check where he bought his lunch and get as clear an idea as you can where his walk took him and where it ended and when.’
‘You talk as if I have an army of constables here,’ the Inspector protested. ‘I have precisely seven, and two are extras brought in from the next county. Why don’t you charge this man Wilt?’
‘Because he was the victim of an assault, not the perpetrator of one. And I don’t mean he was just mugged in Ipford. He was bleeding from a head wound when he was in the Leyline Lodge garage and when she drove him down to Ipford. He’s not on the suspect list any more.’
‘So what does it matter where he went?’
‘Because he may have been a witness to the fire and who started it. Why else did this woman take him down there? In any case, he has amnesia. Can’t remember who or what hit him. That’s the official psychiatric report.’
‘What a hell of a case,’ said the Inspector. ‘I’m dashed if I understand it.’
Which was exactly what could be said for Ruth the Ruthless. Deprived of sleep, endlessly cross-examined and made to drink extremely strong coffee, she was desperate and unable to give any coherent answers to the questions being put to her. To make matters worse she had been charged with hindering the course of justice, falsifying a birth certificate and, thanks to Battleby’s seriously damaging allegations, purchasing the paedophile magazines he revelled in. The two so-called journalists Butch Cassidy and the Flashgun Kid had had writs issued in relation to the attacks by Wilfred and Pickles and the media were having a field-day smearing her in the tabloids. Even the broadsheet papers were using her reputation to attack the Opposition.
At 45 Oakhurst Avenue Wilt was having something of a hard time too, convincing Eva that he didn’t know where his walking tour had taken him.
‘You didn’t want to know where you were going? You mean you’ve forgotten?’ she said.
Wilt sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said. It was easier to lie than to try to explain.
‘And you told me you had to work for a course next term on Communism and Castro,’ Eva persisted. ‘I suppose you’ve forgotten that too.’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘So you took those awful books with you?’
Wilt looked miserably at the books on the shelf and had to admit he’d left them behind. ‘I only meant to be away a fortnight.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Wilt’s sigh was audible this time. It would be impossible to explain his wish to see the English countryside without any literary associations to her. Eva would never understand and almost certainly would suppose there was another woman involved. ‘Suppose’ was too mild a word: she’d be certain. Wilt went on to the offensive.
‘What brought you back so quickly from Wilma? I thought you were going to be over there for six weeks?’ he asked.
Eva hesitated. In her own way she was suffering from self-induced amnesia about the events in Wilma and in any case, coming home to learn her Henry had been mugged and was in hospital and incapable of recognising her had been so traumatic, she hadn’t had a spare second to consider what had caused Uncle Wally to have an infarct and Auntie Joan to turn so nasty and throw her and the quads out of the house. The only answer she could come up with was that their return had been necessitated by Wally Immelmann’s two heart attacks.
‘Couldn’t have happened to a better bloke,’ said Wilt. ‘Mind you, the way he swilled vodka with his steak at the Tavern in the Park and followed it up with that murderous drink he called A Bed of Nails, I’m surprised he’s lived so long.’
And with the happy thought that the ghastly Wally was finally getting his comeuppance he went to his study and made a long and uncomplimentary entry about Mr Immelmann in his diary. He hoped it would be the bastard’s obituary.
Chapter 37